Android is the operating system that powers over 1 billion smartphones and tablets. Since these devices make our lives so sweet, each Android version is named after a dessert: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. As everybody finds it difficult to stay away from chocolate we decided to name the next version of Android after one of our favorite chocolate treats, Kitkat!

Not a whole lot of information just yet. The page says "It's our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody", which could mean either a focus on lower-end, cheaper devices, improved support for more form factors such as laptops, or both.

As for the name - the BBC reports that Nestle is okay with Android using the KitKat name, and that no money is exchanging hands. A deal was reached within 24 hours.

The problem is simply that people can't find enough to bitch about already (odd, when you consider just how much shit is going on right now), and this is something new they can scream at. Simple as that.

To be fair, Nestle have altered the taste of a lot of the Rountree products they took over. They also changed the Smarties tube to be an hexagon shape rather than circular and removed the plastic lid, which when I was a kid was something you collected. Each lid had a letter on it and the "game" was to complete the alphabet. The new tubes have some kind of paper lid which attempts to mimic the old game, but it's ruined it really.

I had no idea KitKat was Nestle outside of the US. Here its Hersheys, which is somewhat less evil. Nestle, I can't really forgive for its terrible (non chocolate) food its inflicted upon me and much of the world.

There has been a lot of scandal involving Nestle which you can google for. My main complaint is that they destroying local flavors with their mass marketed seasonings. When you have a dish in two countries separated by thousands of miles and it tastes the exact same because they used the same nestle seasoning, its depressing.

Hershey is a perpetual licensee. IIRC, they don't actually own the brand in any way. KitKat was originally a British chocolate bar made by Rountree, who were eaten up by Nestlee. They are also the only licensee, so KitKat is now Nestlee worldwide outside of the US.

It's not exactly just a wet dream (NB. for "Wet-" I read "Pipe-"), as I run Android on an old MSI Wind U100 for development testing. It's pretty trivial to install it. It runs from an SD card, so there wasn't even any repartitioning. I could probably remove the hard drive and it would then run a lot longer, but I'm not really that bothered, and having a Windows laptop around is still quite useful every now and again.

On a side note, install Aide, and one has a pretty strong development platform. Debugger is the only fly in the ointment, but always will be on a mobile platform.

Nestle have been doing a lot of Facebook and online marketing for KitKat recently. In the UK they have had two big "votes" where they produced a limited run of flavours of KitKat Chunky (which is called something else by Hershey, BigKit?) and then had a public vote on Facebook to choose the one that would stay in production. There is a fairly active KitKat general presence even after the promotions.

I think Nestle are just trying out this kind of thing. It seems to be working well enough.

No idea about Hershey though, they are a complete black box with regards to KitKat and my world view, which is actually odd - given that the Google Campus where the Android developers are based is obviously in the US... so their favourite chocolate bar is probably the US version... which makes the whole campaign doubly odd